Composer’s portrait Bryce Dessner

For Bryce Dessner, music is one thing more than anything else: boundless. Hardly any other artist moves between genres, styles and movements with such light-footedness and ease. Born in Cincinnati in 1976 and based in Paris, the multi-talented musician has no problem with boundaries. As a guitarist, he is a member of the US indie rock band ‘The National’, which was founded in 1999 and has a long-standing cult image. Beyond this, he composes classical works and writes film music. His music creates atmospherically dense, colourful soundscapes. The classical heritage shines through in them, as do influences from minimalism, electronic, spherical ambient music and folk. It is all as diverse as the cultural melting pot that is New York, from which he draws his inspiration, and yet it all seems astonishingly homogeneous. As part of the ‘Nachtmusik der Moderne’, Dessner can be experienced not only as a composer but also as a guitarist.